All Hallows by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Vanessa Montez

Vanessa often thought about a story her mother had told her when she was a little girl. Mom had been coming home from shopping for her wedding dress, the sky low and gray, a light November rain falling. She had been on the highway, headlights spearing the dark as evening arrived. Coming over the top of a hill, she had heard the windshield wipers begin to scrape the glass and felt a tremor of fear. She tapped the brakes just once to test the road and felt the tires slide. As she crested the hill, she tapped the brakes very lightly again, and once more, enough to slow the car just a bit.

Just in time. As she came over the top of the hill, she had seen the accident beginning. Someone else had realized the rain had frozen on the surface of the road. Black ice. The first driver to notice had hit the brakes, slowed enough that someone else had rear-ended them, starting a chain reaction. But Vanessa’s mom had already slowed down, and as other cars continued to careen into one another, she kept her foot off the brake and somehow managed to navigate through the ongoing pileup. Cars smashed and caromed, spun in circles, and slid off the road. Others came over the hill behind her and tried too late to slow down. She had to nudge her accelerator to avoid being struck from the rear.

She had felt that night as if she were inside some invisible, protective bubble, gliding through disaster without being touched by it.

That was how the Koenigs’ party felt to Vanessa tonight.

Neighbors she had known all her life behaved like high school kids, and the high school kids observed them with the brand of horror usually reserved for girls overhearing the private conversations of boys for the first time. A woman who had been Vanessa’s first grade teacher had drunk so much that she had slapped the ass of one of Mr. Koenig’s friends and then tittered as if this had been some elegant Jane Austen flirtation. Seeing these people, in this state, felt like one long ongoing car accident. Her own parents were chatting amiably with the Colemans on the little patio beside the Koenigs’ deck. They did not seem on the verge of bursting into song or dropping into an orgy or any other behavior that would humiliate her, but neither did they seem distressed by the boisterous drunks around them.

“This is a nightmare,” Vanessa said.

She and Steve stood beside the wall of lilac bushes that would flower beautifully in the spring but were unremarkable in the fall. Owen O’Leary and two of his friends were a few feet away. As she glanced over at them, she saw Owen wink at her—nothing salacious, just a hello—and eat half a hot dog in a single bite. Which was a feat, considering the mountain of condiments he had stacked on top of that dog.

“If you hate it so much, we should go,” Steve replied.

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